


In Your Wildest Dreams

by amurderof



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Manipulation, Multi, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-31
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 06:32:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2057538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amurderof/pseuds/amurderof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the hours since Derek’s been awake, he’s pieced together the following:</p>
<p>-	It’s 2012.<br/>-	He graduated from Beacon Hills High School in 2006 with okay grades.<br/>-	He… delayed college? Traveled? Took a light course load? Because he’s now in his final semester at Beacon Hills Community College and he has no idea what he’s studying.<br/>-	His family is alive.<br/>-	Even his grandmother, who’d been old when—<br/>-	Everyone.<br/>-	Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, so everyone’s also in town, or going to be.<br/>-	Laura has the most obnoxiously adorable child since Nicole’s kids were toddlers.</p>
<p>He’s fairly sure he’s not just saying that because he’s her uncle.</p>
<p>===</p>
<p>Or, that one time Derek woke up in his old bed at the Hale house and the only thing freaking him out more than his family's being alive was the fact that he drove a Prius.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I started writing this between seasons 2 and 3, and then sort of stopped writing it when season 3 made me sadface a lot. However, I really, really want to finish it. I opened the Word DOC this afternoon, reread it, and just started writing again -- and now I'm placing it here to give myself the much-needed motivation to pick it back up on the long term.
> 
> This fic exists in a weird nebulous world where nobody's dead and Scott's the alpha, because yes. Tags will be added as the story progresses, and the rating will almost certainly go up. Please let me know what you think. :)

Derek wakes up in a bed and everything is wrong.

Given enough time to think about it, he’ll realize that’s a piss-poor reason to realize things are wrong – waking up in an honest-to-God bed – but for now all he’s got is that the room smells like old, oiled wood and fresh paint, and when he sits up he pushes back a blue and black checkerboard duvet and stares at the pine desk across the room, neat stacks of paper and notebooks and a framed picture of.

He’s across the room in the next second, fumbling at the frame with shaking hands. He drops it on the floor on accident. The glass breaks and from somewhere downstairs his mom hollers, asking if he’s all right.

“I’m fine!” he says back, and he squats to pick up the pieces, his breath catching when the broken glass snags his skin.

The photo’s undamaged. It’s of his high school graduation: he’s wearing a deep red cap and gown over a polo and khakis, and on either side of him are his mom and dad, his sisters. Nicole’s actually smiling with teeth, her cheeks dimpling, and Laura looks like she’s ten seconds from giving him bunny ears. Cora _is_ giving him bunny ears. His mom and dad are both grinning big, their expressions twisted up with their happiness.

Their faces are lined, their hair greying, and the frame slides from Derek’s hand back onto the floor with a clatter.

The stairs between the first and second floors creak, they always creaked, and so Derek’s already looking at the doorway into his room when his mom steps into it. She’s wiping her hands on her apron. She’s wearing orange nail polish and her dark hair’s pulled back from her face into a loose ponytail, and Derek’s never seen her at this age before. She didn’t live to this age before.

“Everything all right up here? Lose motor function during your nap?”

“Yeah,” Derek says, and when her nose crinkles, “no. I dropped the frame.”

“I can see that,” she says, but her mouth is smiling, she always smiled, even when she was being serious, not that she is now. Derek’s not sure how she’s being anything now, anything that isn’t.

She reaches over and flicks his bedroom lights on, and when he’s distracted staring at the posters on the walls, ones he doesn’t remember, the snapshots patchworked above his bed, his own reflection in the dresser mirror, she says, “Well, you know where the dustpan is. And once you’re fully awake, you’re needed downstairs. The rugrats don’t babysit themselves.”

He nods and she heads back down. The stairs creak again. He’s used to hearing them creak because they’re barely holding themselves together. Because they should be torn down.

He stares at his reflection in the mirror and tries to piece together… he looks the same. Less tired, but then he just woke up from a nap.

He has no idea what’s going on, but the dustpan’s still in the hallway closet, across from his sisters’ shared bathroom.

*

In the hours since Derek’s been awake, he’s pieced together the following:

\- It’s 2012.  
\- He graduated from Beacon Hills High School in 2006 with okay grades.  
\- He… delayed college? Travelled? Took a light course load? Because he’s now in his final semester at Beacon Hills Community College and he has no idea what he’s studying.  
\- His family is alive.  
\- Even his grandmother, who’d been old when—  
\- Everyone.  
\- Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, so everyone’s also in town, or going to be.  
\- Laura has the most obnoxiously adorable child since Nicole’s kids were toddlers.

He’s fairly sure he’s not just saying that because he’s her uncle.

Lola’s just two years old and a motor mouth. She’s got big brown eyes and dishwater blonde hair and when he comes downstairs for the first time she immediately drops the wooden train she’d been playing with, walks over to him, grabs him by the hand, and makes him sit down on the couch so she can climb onto his lap. He stays there for a good five minutes while she tells him about her day, about the squirrel she saw in the woods and how her dad wouldn’t let her chase it, and if she notices how tense he is she doesn’t say anything.

She’s a werewolf, so she should at least be able to smell it, but she just keeps talking like this is a normal part of her day. Maybe it is. Maybe he always comes downstairs awkward and anxious and she babbles at him until he relaxes under her, slides an arm around her waist and asks her to tell him about the squirrel again.

“It was _HUGE_ ,” she says, and her soft, chubby arms flail out to her sides. The hollow space behind Derek’s sternum that he ignores most days _aches_ , shudders, and she does notice something’s wrong then, drops her hands before reaching up towards him, bouncing her palms off of his cheeks and demanding, “Stop frowning.”

“Sorry,” he says immediately, and she grins and slides off his lap, reaches for a stuffed lion on the dark green rug. She shakes it at him and roars.

Laura comes into the living room from the kitchen and Derek’s heart jumps into his throat and sticks there. She must be… 26, she’s 26. She’s 26 and she never grabbed his hand and choked out that they were going to leave, they were going to go find family, there was no point staying in Beacon Hills, she’d protect him, she was his alpha now and she’d protect him.

He jerks up from the couch, his hands hanging uselessly at his sides, and she laughs at him, beckons him towards her. Her hair’s cut short, just above her ears, and her face is rounder. She used to tell him she wanted to be Joan Jett when she grew up, and now she’s wearing one of those wrap things which means there’s – a baby, she has a baby, pink and blobbish and Derek can just see its face through the fabric.

“Can you take her? Julie and Peter are supposed to be here in a couple hours and Dad burned the tri-tip.”

From the back porch Derek hears his father’s gruff “I did not”, and Laura grins at him as she starts unwinding the… thing. Derek stands there stupidly until she’s passed the baby to him, at which point he’s standing there stupidly with a baby. He hasn’t held a baby in years, since Cora and his cousin Emily were born, but Laura knocks against his shoulder like this is what they do now, goes to the front door, grabs her old leather jacket and a helmet from the closet, heads on out. He hears the low growl of a motorcycle and that more than anything makes relief punch through Derek, that she could be someone so wholly unrecognizable to him now, but still Laura.

The baby gurgles against his chest and he stares at it. Her? Oh my God, babies just smell like babies.

He slumps back onto the couch before his legs give out on him and watches Lola drive her lion into the rug with the merciless singlemindedness of children. He guesses. He was 8 when Emily was born, and most of what he remembers of her being small is how she expected to be included in everything they did.

The baby huffs and Derek looks down at it again, shifts it so he’s supporting the head, he remembers that much. From the rug Lola grunts and says, “ _I’m_ funner to play with than _her_ ,” and Derek has to swallow back a laugh. It might be hysterical.

He has two nieces that didn’t exist yesterday, and they’re already getting started on sibling rivalry.

*

His mom wasn’t kidding about babysitting. Everyone else is in the kitchen or out back, so Derek spends the next hour and a half keeping Lola from tearing her lion apart during a vivid reenactment of Little Red Riding Hood, and/or shuffling across the floor so the baby’s snuffling doesn’t turn into full-blown crying.

Laura comes back carrying two bags of red meat and shrugs her jacket onto the floor, dropping the helmet on top. She ruffles Lola’s hair on her way to the kitchen and shoots Derek a smile before she disappears through the door. Lola drops her armless lion – when the hell did she…? – and drags her hands across her head to flatten her baby curls, and then her head jerks towards the door and Derek’s follows. He doesn’t recognize the car pulling in but Lola must, because she’s on her feet and rushing to the door, reaching up for the knob before Derek can move.

She gets it open, stretching up on her tip toes, in time for Peter to swoop in, bending to slide an arm under her knees, lift her up in a princess-carry.

Derek doesn’t move. He doesn’t move until Lola’s shrieking, Peter’s grin near her stomach, and then he’s two feet away and shifting the baby into his left arm so he can sink his claws into Peter’s gut and Peter’s blowing a raspberry next to Lola’s belly button, and she’s giggling.

Oh.

Peter looks up at him, Lola squirming in his hold, and tilts his head to one side. “All right, Derek?” He glances down at Derek’s right hand, then up to his left arm around his niece, and says, “Be careful. If you break her, you bought her.”

“Nobody’s buying Elsie,” Aunt Julie snaps, and she arcs around Peter in the doorway, takes the baby – Elsie – from Derek and holds her close and dear, coos down at her. “Oh God, do you remember them when they were this size? Look at her fingers, I could eat her up.”

Aunt Julie’s just as Derek remembers her, short and curving and olive-skinned and human. She presses a finger to Elsie’s nose before glancing up at Derek, smiling wide. “Angus and Emily are out unloading the car.”

In case it’s not clear, Peter says, “And I’m sure they’d appreciate the help,” before slinging Lola onto his hip, asking her if she’ll tell her grandpa if he slips her candy.

Peter’s good with kids, Derek remembers distantly, and he maneuvers around them out the front door before Peter can hear how fast his heart’s beating, can ask him if he’s all right, can look at him with clear eyes and a smile on his face that Derek doesn’t know how to react to.

Emily’s leaning against the side of the SUV watching her brother drag their suitcases out of the back, but when she hears Derek crunching down the driveway she turns with a shout and hurtles herself at him. He catches her and she throws her arms around his neck, squeezes tight once before letting go so she can slide back to earth. She’s… 16 now, and she’s beautiful. She has her mother’s face, her complexion, her _height_ , but her grin’s all Peter, and from the way Angus yells at her to come back and help and she ignores him, so’s her work ethic.

“Look at you, all muscle-y and grumpy. Is this a werewolf thing? Do you guys go through a second puberty when you hit twenty that focuses on your pecs?” She pokes Derek in the chest and turns to Angus and the car, shoving her hands in the pockets of her cargo pants. “You never told me it was a _thing_ , Angus.”

Angus slams the back of the SUV shut and picks up three of their suitcases, coming around the side towards them and glaring at his sister. “It’s not a thing and you know that, oh my _God_ , being stuck in a car with you was torture.” He dumps the suitcases onto the driveway when he’s next to them, bumps shoulders with Derek. In the last eight years, Angus has grown taller than him – he hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, at 13, when.

Derek brushes past them and picks up the last two suitcases, leads them up to the house and through the front door. The suitcases can go in the guest rooms, to the left of the living room and down the hall on each side. He doesn’t know what belongs to whom, but he stands to the side and Angus and Emily divvy them up, knocking against each other, Angus muttering about how she’s lucky she’s the _baby_.

“You’re just still mad that when I broke my arm you had to do all my chores. Oh friiiick, Derek, did I tell you about that? Dad went _white_ , he was so freaked out, I thought he was going to _cry_. You’re so lucky you heal because if you didn’t you’d all be the _biggest babies_.”

“There are so many things wrong with that argument,” Angus says, rolling his eyes, and Emily snorts her disagreement.

Derek should probably… talk more, he realizes once they’ve dropped everything off and make for the living room. He was always a shy kid but he made an effort around the pack. His cousins. His _family_.

He’s objectively glad that no one’s asked him how he’s doing today.

*

Emily and Angus take over babysitting and Derek excuses himself, goes in the opposite direction of the kitchen where the voices of his family are running together, he’s heard his father and his grandmother but not seen them, his Aunt Lana, and he’s downstairs before he thinks about it. He hesitates on the last step, his hand curling into the banister as he stares into the dark corners of the basement, but all he smells is paint thinner and mulch, and that’s what does it.

That’s it, that’s the last Goddamn straw, and he sinks down onto that last step, his fingernails digging into the polished wood of the banister, and he presses his face against his knees, tries to breathe.

This isn’t real. It _can’t be real_.

There’s no explanation for this that isn’t something screwing with him, taking him out of the picture so they can advance on the pack. He’s knocked out somewhere and this is all a hallucination, and every second he’s out is a second the pack is in danger, and it’s.

He shudders, screws his eyes shut and lets his fingernails lengthen into claws – something to focus on, splintering hardwood.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, trying not to lose his mind, but he doesn’t have a handle on his breathing even when he hears the door to the basement open, the shuffle slide of his Grandma Emma’s slippers on the steps. She comes to a stop a step above him, sits down carefully and slides her fingers into his hair, rests her palm against the back of his head.

“Too many people, pup?”

Her voice is soft, low and crackling, and he tilts his head against his knees to look at her, yanks his claws out of the banister and wraps his arms around his shins. She looks so old, soft wrinkled skin and thin white hair, but she smiles like his mom smiles, constant and controlled, and her eyes are sharp.

“Yeah.” It’s true in the way everything he says is true: to some extent, to keep his heartbeat steady. But she’s an old wolf, and she could always read him better than he wanted.

When her fingers tighten in his hair, tug, he smiles without thinking about it.

“Who gave you permission to tell me that lie?” She flattens her hand against his skull and he presses back into the touch, breathes in slowly.

When he was 13, a week before he started high school, he ran away, disappeared into the preserve. He’d been homeschooled with the rest of the pack up to that point, and even though Laura loved public school, came home every day with exaggerated stories about how much the chemistry teacher hated her and how she was basically the star performer on the track team (“even _without_ wolfing out, Dad, chill out”), Derek knew he’d hate it. He _liked_ being homeschooled, liked how it was just the six of them – him, Cora, Angus, Emily, and Nicole’s kids, Teagan and Quinn. He liked that each adult in the pack rotated in to teach a different subject, and they didn’t have to worry about watching what they said, or controlling their wolves. He liked the solitude of it, that when he got trapped in his own thoughts it was his dad pulling him out of them, or his aunt, and that extra credit was to sink into the books in their library, pick an obscure topic and go for it.

His grandmother’s the one who found him huddled between two gnarled, reaching roots, and she hadn’t said anything at first, just sat down next to him and threaded her fingers through his hair until he opened his mouth and told her he was scared. Sometimes when he got mad at Cora he still flashed his eyes, and how was he supposed to keep them a secret if he couldn’t even control that? How was he supposed to protect the pack when there were so many people, and what if he said something to just make them _go away_?

He’d expected her to laugh at him, to dismiss his fears and tell him that it’d be fine, he’d be fine, and instead she’d hummed and stood up, scraping her nails against his scalp as she drew away. “That’s something we can work on, then,” she’d said. “We have seven days, don’t we? Think you can do it?”

“No,” he’d replied steadily, and she’d reached out for his hand, shook it.

“Listen to that lie! You’ll blend in with humans yet, pup.”

He looks at her now, eight years later and still just as comfortable teasing him when he’s at his wit’s end, and he doesn’t stop himself from saying, “I think I’m dreaming.”

Her eyes narrow, and her smile twists, calculating, her curiosity piqued. As the eldest member of the Hale pack, she keeps their records, and there are entire journals full of dreams in the library. She sits up straight, her spine popping. “And why’s that?”

“Eight years ago hunters burnt this house to the ground,” he says in a rush, and he holds his breath once the words have left his mouth, as though everything will come crashing down around him now that he’s pointed it out.

She purses her lips, tilting her head to the right, considering. Her hand slides down to his neck, her fingers curling against his skin. “You know no one blames you for that, Derek.”

Derek jerks against her grip and stands, turning around to face her. She frowns, sees it for the defensive positioning it is. She was never in line to be alpha in her pack but her sister had been their second, and on days when she would teach the children she’d regularly talk about posturing, placement.

She waits for him to find his tongue and he _hates that_ , the reminder that they never said he was weird or stubborn or – _anything_ for not knowing what to say, that his mother called him her _thoughtful child_ and that they’d fill the spaces around his silence and it was never awkward.

He breathes around the weight in his chest and eventually settles on, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Well, I’m lost too,” she says, and drops her hands to her knees. “Did you dream while you slept, something different? Sometimes when I wake from a more lucid dream, I think it actually happened for hours after.”

He wants the years since 2004 to have been a dream so badly it hurts, under his ribs, but that’s not possible. He lived every day, every damned day of those six years, and he just woke up here, in this alternate reality, where the fire didn’t happen and his family is whole and Kate—

“What happened?”

“Derek…”

“Humor me. From the beginning.”

She purses her lips and Derek listens to her heart beat, steady and strong, as she says, “When you were 16 you told your father you were in love with someone, an older woman, so soon after you told us you’d never love again, and he passed the information along to the rest of us. It didn’t take long for Peter to figure out it was Kate Argent, so we were ready for her.”

“Ready for her?”

“You’re a poor parrot, Derek,” she says, and he nods, nods and reaches for her shoulder, squeezes as he lopes up the stairs, his mind already miles ahead, across Beacon Hills.

“Going out for a bit.”

Nobody intercepts him on his way out of the house. He reaches into his pocket and the keys to the Camaro aren’t there because _it’s still Laura’s car_ , but the keys to a Toyota are; he presses the unlock button and stares stupidly at the black Prius at the end of the driveway when its lights flash.

The seat and mirrors are adjusted to his height and there’s a Dead Man’s Bones CD in the stereo. When he reverses out of the driveway, the only thing he can think is _at least it’s black_ , and then that he must take the babysitting thing pretty seriously because there are unicorn stickers on the dashboard.

*

The most recent grave in their family plot in the cemetery is his grandfather’s. It’s been recently maintained, weeded, and there are fresh flowers in the vase to the right of the headstone. When he was little, Aunt Lana would drive his grandmother to the cemetery every Sunday afternoon. Apparently she still does.

He ends up sitting down next to the headstone, his arm brushing the petals of the nearest flower. He doesn’t know how long he stays there. An hour, maybe — long enough to feel the heat against his face, his skin burning and then healing, burning and then healing in the bright winter sun.

He only moves when he hears someone else pull into the cemetery’s parking lot, clamber out of — oh hell —his crappy old blue Jeep, shove his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and trudge down the dirt path towards the other side of the cemetery, away from the family plots.

If Stiles is in this weird fever dream, then Scott probably is, and with Peter sane, Scott’s not a werewolf, let alone an alpha. Let alone _Derek’s_ alpha.

He’s up on his feet, following Stiles down the dirt path _towards his mother’s grave, probably_ , and stops a good twenty feet away because he’s not a complete asshole. They probably don’t even know each other. Derek’s not going to walk up to him and shove their shoulders together, ask him for updates from their benevolent leader. Which makes it doubly weird when Stiles turns around anyway, walks towards Derek — what the hell — jerking like a frigging puppet, his head rocking between his shoulders. Derek’s standing too still, his body ricocheting between fight and flight, so it’s easy for Stiles to grab him by the front of his shirt, shake him, and hiss,

“Derek, I swear to God, _wake up_ , you stupid _asshole_ , I am going to _murder you_.”

And then he’s gone. Not back at his mom’s grave. Not in his Jeep, which is gone from the parking lot too when Derek wheels around to find it. Just… gone.

And then a cell phone in Derek’s front jean pocket buzzes. It’s a text from Cora. _Come home, dipshit. We need your big manly shoulders to mash potatoes. <3_

So he… he goes home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's going on? Is this just another chapter in Derek Hale's No Good Very Bad Life™? _Tune in next time_ : same AO3 time, same AO3 channel.
> 
> Also, I'm [amurderof](http://amurderof.tumblr.com) on tumblr. Come hang out. I have a lot of feelings.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Have you ever thought,” Dad says, leaning his head back so he can look up at the grey sky, “how unfair it is that I’m the only one in this Goddamn family who can get frostbite, and yet I’m also the one who gets stuck on the back porch in November?”
> 
> His dad loved these questions, the rhetorical “Why does the human…?” lines of inquiry, which never failed to make his mom roll her eyes. Derek used to hate it. He can feel that hate, distantly, like there are three layers of padding between him and the emotion. He can’t hate his dad right now, even though when Derek looks down at the patio, he’s wearing socks and Birkenstocks.
> 
>  _What a loser_ , Derek thinks, and it surprises him that he doesn’t feel guilty for thinking it. Just fond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOLY CRAP I WROTE ANOTHER CHAPTER. Thank you all for reading the first chapter, and I hope you enjoy this second part as well. It's shorter than the first, but writing 2.6K words in three days is like, unreal for me. I'm so proud. :')
> 
> Also, true story: I pasted the text into the chapter summary field by accident, and stared stupidly at the error telling me it was several thousand characters too long for... a really unfortunately long time.

Thanksgiving’s a great holiday. Everyone eats too much, and there’s no such thing as personal space. After everyone’s stuffed themselves, they play games, watch movies, watch _home_ movies that one mortifying time.

When he was 14, every body that could fit was shoved together around the living room coffee table as they picked teams for Risk, too many people to play one per each color. Derek had ended up on Peter and Grandma’s team, which had actually been great, because at the end of the day it was the three of them against Mom and Nicole (because Cora’d gotten bored and wandered off to eat pie out of the pan), and Peter’d brought his helluva lot of luck to the table. They’d… Derek thinks his team won. He doesn’t remember that part, only remembers Mom’s smirk and Peter’s sneer, and the steady sound of the dice rolling.

This year Derek already feels too big for his body, awkward with his limbs. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to maneuver his way around so many people, how he can keep from giving something away, letting everyone know he’s a huge imposter. That he doesn’t belong here.

When he gets back from the cemetery, as soon as he walks in the front door, Cora swings an arm around his shoulders and punches him in the jaw, hard enough that it stings for a second, and he’s reaching out for her, trapping her in a headlock before he can think about it, dragging his knuckles across the top of her head like he did when she was a hellaciously bratty nine-year-old. She shrieks at him, laughing, and pummels her fists into his chest, and he — he’s laughing too, trying to arc away from her punches while still giving her the noogie to end all noogies.

It’s easy. It’s easy like _breathing_ , and Derek thinks maybe, maybe it’s like this, maybe this is how he’ll survive, maybe it’ll be as easy as this.

“You _bastard_ ,” Cora heaves, her voice shaky from laughing, and Nicole leans out the kitchen door, drying her hands on a dishtowel.

“ _Children_.” She flashes her eyes at them, and Derek lets go of Cora and she stops punching him, and they both stand up straight. Derek leans into Cora a little, can’t help himself, feels the warmth from her shoulder against his arm. She knocks him with her elbow.

Nicole throws the dishtowel at Cora, or tries to, and they all watch it fall on the floor halfway between them.

“Wooow,” Cora says, and when Nicole levels a look at her and comes out of the kitchen, Cora peels up the stairs towards her bedroom. 

Derek picks up the fallen dishtowel before Nicole gets to it and passes it to her, huffing another laugh when he realizes she’s wearing one of Dad’s old aprons, this ratty thing that says _I Like Pig Butts and I Cannot Lie_. She reaches up and runs a hand through his hair, and he ducks his head, tries not to concentrate on how _comforting_ it feels.

“Where’d you run off to? Laura said you were acting weird this morning.”

He tenses back up, arms straight at his sides. She clacks her tongue, tugs his ear until he has to move, slaps her hand away.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have too many sisters,” is what comes out, automatic. It’s the wrong thing to say. The airy relief of something as simple as roughhousing turns to concrete in his chest and — Nicole’s laughing, like he said something funny, until her expression collapses into a frown and she reaches out, her hand settling warm and firm on his shoulder.

“Derek, what’s wrong?”

He wonders what his face looks like right now. What his oldest sister — who calmly watched as he and Laura fought over who got the next piggyback ride, who sat on Cora as punishment when she was mad at her, who walked into his bedroom after Paige and flashed her yellow eyes and smiled at him when he flashed his blue eyes back — sees that makes her so concerned.

“Nothing,” he says, and his voice breaks halfway through the word.

She sets her jaw, grabs his wrist with the hand not on his arm. She was going to be his alpha, when Mom died. She was strong and methodical, thoughtful in a way none of her siblings were.

Laura had joked when they were kids that she and Nicole were the spare and the heir, and Nicole turned to her, fixed her with a long look, said, _You might be alpha one day. Don’t turn it into a joke_.

One night in New York, when neither of them could sleep, he and Laura had pulled the pillows from their beds and lay on a rug on the floor, feet apart, and Laura had dragged a hand across her face, said, _Do you ever want to reach back into the past and slap yourself?_ And then, because things between them were still tender, because Laura was angry and Derek never told her about Kate but she _knew_ , she had to know, _Of course you do._

Nicole had the temperament to be an alpha. A good alpha, thoughtful and considering. Laura had tried. He had too, if you could call that slow car crash “trying”.

She would’ve liked Scott.

“Derek.”

He shakes his head, slowly, tries to push it all away, ignore the gnawing shame in his gut. “I had a bad dream.”

He can’t straight-up lie again. She’s suspicious already, and if she and their grandmother share notes… “Peter didn’t catch Kate in time, and the whole house. Laura and me were, and Peter, we were the only ones — I _don’t_ have too many sisters.”

“Hey, hey.” She steps close and wraps her arms around him, hugs him for the first time in seven years, and he drops his head onto her shoulder, bends forward enough to make it work. “It was only a dream. We’re okay. You’re okay.”

It sounds true, coming from her.

*

Nicole sends him outside after his breakdown in the living room, tells him to help Dad with the barbecue, so he brushes past everyone in the kitchen (his mom, Laura, and some man he’s never seen before — Laura’s husband?) and slips out back, walks across the creaking patio to his dad, who’s got the grey hair like in the picture in Derek’s room, who’s got wrinkles Derek’s never seen before.

“You’ve been exiled,” Dad says, humming under his breath as he stands in front of the closed grill, his hands in the pockets of his aviator jacket. He’s wearing his favorite pair of sunglasses, these ultra-reflective monstrosities. His favorite movie was _Top Gun_ , unironically.

Whatever Derek was going to reply catches in his throat. He just nods.

“Have you ever thought,” Dad says, leaning his head back so he can look up at the grey sky, “how unfair it is that I’m the only one in this Goddamn family who can get frostbite, and yet I’m also the one who gets stuck on the back porch in November?”

His dad loved these questions, the rhetorical “Why does the human…?” lines of inquiry, which never failed to make his mom roll her eyes. Derek used to hate it. He can feel that hate, distantly, like there are three layers of padding between him and the emotion. He can’t hate his dad right now, even though when Derek looks down at the patio, he’s wearing socks and Birkenstocks.

 _What a loser_ , Derek thinks, and it surprises him that he doesn’t feel guilty for thinking it. Just fond.

“You get pissed when anyone tries to help.”

His dad picks up the grilling tongs, smacks Derek with them on the side of his thigh. “I don’t have time for your sass today.”

“Because you have to make sure you don’t burn _this_ round of meat?”

His dad _laughs_ , full-bellied like Laura used to, leaning back as though he’s giving himself room for it. “You’re such a little shit.” When he rights himself, he opens the lid of the grill and hovers over the cooking meat, breathing the smoke in. “Don’t tell your mother I said that.”

They had a swear jar, inside the kitchen on the counter under the microwave. When he was a kid, whoever did their chores the best every week would get whatever was inside, which was always at least _something_ because Peter would come by to talk to Mom and walk out five bucks lighter.

They _have_ a swear jar, he guesses. Now. Probably still in the same spot. He wonders who gets the prize every week.

He reaches out a hand, palm up, and raises an eyebrow at his dad. “That’s a one-dollar word.”

Dad cracks the tongs against his palm — they’re still hot from the grill, and Derek hisses, “God _damnit_ , Dad,” before he can stop himself — and Dad grins at him, with teeth, before closing the grill lid.

“Now we’re even.”

Derek wipes his skin against his jeans and thinks about stealing the tongs, decides it’s not worth his dad and Emily teaming up to whine about how nobody respects the human elements of the family anymore.

The door to the kitchen slides open and Derek looks over, half-expecting to see Nicole calling them children again, but it’s Cora. She makes a beeline for Derek and slaps him across the face, _what the hell_ , and Derek’s vision is swimming, like the hit did something to his brain. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out, and his limbs are too heavy, he can’t lift his arm to touch his stinging cheek.

“You’re getting the greatest hits, aren’t you? Everybody happy and hanging out like we’re the friggin’ Stepford Pack.” Cora’s skin is sliding off of her face, rearranging itself, bruises blossoming under her eyes, her mouth somehow sneering at him and hanging open, blood leaking out at the sides, at the same time. Derek feels sick but he can’t move, doesn’t have the energy to throw up. “You know this isn’t real.”

He remembers Stiles, all of a sudden. He’d forgotten, somehow: the cemetery, Stiles yelling at him, disappearing. How’d he forget Stiles? Telling him to wake up, and then Cora, now, what the hell is going—

She snarls at him, and for one long moment all he sees is her bloody and tired and angry, out of place behind their home. “You _know_ this isn’t real, Derek.”

He stumbles back, he needs — Stiles told him to wake up, but he’s not asleep. He wouldn’t know Stiles, or Scott, or anyone else in this life. Maybe it was a dream. This _feels_ real. What is this, if it’s not real—

There’s a hand closing around the back of his neck and he tenses, feels his fangs drop, and when he jerks to the side it’s just his dad. It’s just his dad, face white, asking him if he’s okay, what’s wrong, he looks like he saw a ghost.

“I’m, I’m fine. I’m okay.”

He’s stupidly grateful, suddenly, that his dad’s human, that he has no way of knowing if Derek’s lying or not outside of his expression, of the way he’s shaking. That he doesn’t know something’s… that something was wrong.

Derek looks towards the house, Dad’s hand falling from his neck. Cora’s inside with Laura, Mom, and… and Laura’s husband. Nothing’s wrong. He doesn’t know why he’s shaking.

“I’m okay, Dad.”

His dad nods, slaps his on the shoulder. Eyes him, before returning his attention to the grill. “God help you if this made me burn anything, though.”

*

Thanksgiving Eve is a thing at their house. They do the majority of the prep work for the following day, and then they defend the fridge’s contents from each other and eat too much pizza in the living room. There are more people in the room than he’s used to, but they have an extra couch.

Derek has Elsie in his arms again, with Lola puttering around the floor with a piece of pepperoni hanging out of her mouth. Nicole’s husband Jeremiah showed up just before the pizza arrived with their kids in tow, so Derek’s got Teagan and Quinn squished in on either side of him on the love seat, each talking a mile a minute about… something, Derek’s not paying attention. He wants to be, but he’s only half-awake after fighting Angus for the extra-large garbage-can pizza, and he’s entering a food coma. Angus disappeared out onto the front porch ten minutes ago, so Derek’s counting it as a victory. A very mellow, overstuffed victory.

A car pulls up in front of the house but nobody reacts, so Derek doesn’t either. He can hear Angus shouting at somebody, happy, and then the front door’s slamming open and Angus bounds in followed by a couple other kids around his age, probably friends he hasn’t seen since they graduated high school, here to hang out before the big family day tomorrow.

Derek sits up straight, Elsie fussing at him, Teagan muttering at him for shifting suddenly.

Angus jerks his thumb at Stiles and Scott, standing just inside the front door, then waves his hand at his sprawling family. “Everybody remember everybody?”

“Yeah, it’s not like you have fifteen thousand people in your family,” Stiles says, and Scott elbows him.

Stiles looks like he did yesterday, hair buzzed again now that he’s old enough it doesn’t make him look like a kindergartener, too-big coat because Lydia was never able to convince him to wear something that accentuated his positives, even if he didn’t need it.

Scott’s strange to look at, standing with his shoulders rounded forward just enough to communicate that he’s not the alpha he was, doesn’t command the room, doesn’t plan to. He’s not a wolf, and he’s not Derek’s alpha. He’s just a human with asthma — Derek can hear it, the slightest rattle when he breathes in — who knows Angus from school, like Stiles was a human who knew Scott.

“We’re gonna go out back and scrimmage,” Angus says, and everyone turns back to their dinner, their conversations. Derek can’t stop looking at them. Neither Scott nor Stiles move with the confidence he remembers, the resolve you have once you’ve pushed through what it feels like when you survive and someone else doesn’t. They don’t have that, just like Derek doesn’t, here. Except Stiles, with his mom. Which… yesterday, at the cemetery, Stiles was. Derek saw him, at the cemetery, didn’t he?

“Hey, Derek.”

Derek turns awkwardly on the couch, Elsie right-out _whining_ at him for the motion, and Quinn shoves at his hip for getting in her space. Stiles is right behind him. Derek feels tense but he doesn’t remember why.

“We need a fourth. Wanna come play?”

He’s standing with his hands in his pockets, looking just to the side of Derek’s face. Stiles being awkward is a universal constant.

“Uh, I’m kind of—”

“He _sure does_ ,” Cora says from halfway across the room, hopping up to her feet and grabbing Elsie from him before Derek realizes what’s happening. She stares at Stiles and tilts her head, and Stiles glares at her. Derek never thought about the fact that they’re around the same age. Did they go to high school together too?

“ _Thanks_ , Cora.”

“Have you given my Skype handle to Lydia yet?” Cora holds Elsie in one arm and props her free hand on her hip. “I’m not a charity.”

Stiles hisses, “ _Shut up_ ,” and rushes after Scott and Angus. Quinn shoves at him again, already lifting her feet up onto the couch to take over his spot.

Derek knows when he’s been outplayed. He shakes his head and stands, avoids Cora’s fist to his stomach, heads out back where he can already hear Angus and Scott yelling.

God, _family_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm [amurderof](http://amurderof.tumblr.com) on tumblr. Come hang out. I have a lot of feelings about cannibals and zombies.


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